Friday, 14 November 2014

Training Our Eyes

My son, Rowan, plays piano pretty well for a nine-year-old,
but sight-reading is not one of his strengths.He can name notes with the best of them, and can read rhythms like all
get-out, but actually sitting at the piano and sight-reading a piece of
music?It's a little painful.I’ve been trying to figure out why that
is.Turns out (not really surprisingly),
sight-reading depends on a whole host of factors, and it’s not really
clear what are the best methods to improve sight-reading.A recent paper by Jennifer Mishra at the University of Missouri noted that
while there have been hundreds of research studies on trying to improve sight-reading,
most of them show that the training doesn’t really help.Mishra ran a meta-analysis on studies, trying
to pool together different types of sight-reading training to see if there are
any overall take-homes from all these studies.She found that one of the best types of intervention might be to train how our
eyes move when we’re reading music.

You might think that there is not much to know about eye
movements in music reading.Surely we
just sweep our eyes slowly across the page, taking in each note, one at a
time.Right?While it sure seems like this is what we do, it
is actually completely wrong.When we
read music (or text), our eyes make a series of fixations and saccades.During a fixation, we focus our eyes on one
place on the page, usually centred on one particular note.We stay focused on that note for about 250
ms.Then we make a saccade:we flick our eyes ahead in the music, skipping
over a few notes.The saccade is very
fast, less than 50 ms.We then make
another fixation, then another saccade.Our whole reading experience consists of fixations and saccades.We can only take in information during the
fixations; when our eyes are moving, we actually can’t really see anything, so
there’s a little blip of time when we’re not taking in any visual
information.We don’t notice this,
though, because our brains fill in that gap.

We also don’t notice that we’re not focusing on
every single note in turn.We focus on
one note, then skip ahead several notes.That doesn’t mean that we don’t see the notes in between.We read them using our peripheral vision.

For example, in the music above, we might start by focusing
on the D, indicated by the first circle.The red line shows the saccade to the fourth note.We never actually focus on the E and F# in
between; we just read them while we’re focusing on the D.But clearly there’s a limit to how far ahead
we can read while keeping our eyes fixed on that D.That limit is called our perceptual
span:how much we can see in one
fixation.Studies have shown that we generally can
perceive between two to four beats ahead of our focus.

However, beginners, especially children, probably read
note-by-note, not perceiving further ahead in the music.So one approach to improving sight-reading is
to improve students’ perceptual span.

Surprisingly, there has been very little published research
on this topic.A doctoral dissertation
by Robert Lemons in 1984 used the then-cutting-edge technology of a
microcomputer to try to improve perceptual span in college music students.The students had to play the notes as they
flashed for sub-second times onto a computer monitor.As the training went on, more notes were
flashed at a time, forcing the students to read more notes at once.Lemons’s results showed that training the
perceptual span caused a huge improvement in sight-reading compared to control
students who did not have perceptual span training.

And while in the 80’s it was harder for people to lay their
hands on the equipment and software to do this type of training, nowadays it’s
straight-forward.It only took me a
couple of minutes to set up an animation in powerpoint to flash notes onto my
tablet PC screen.I’m experimenting on my son to see whether I can increase his perceptual
span by this kind of training, and whether it helps his sight-reading.I’ll let you know what I turn up.

References

Lemons, R.M. (1984). The development and trial of microcomputer-assisted
techniques to supplement traditional training in musical sight reading.

Madell, J., and Hébert, S. (2008). Eye Movements and Music Reading:
Where Do We Look Next? Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26,
157–170.

5 comments:

This blog and study fascinates me. Thank you for sharing!My oldest son was a ridiculously good sight reader. One day during lessons I corrected him as he was playing, saying "that's a D." He stopped playing and said "Mom, you can't correct me while I'm playing." I asked him why not? His answer blew me away. He said, Because, when you say 'that's a D! I may be playing that measure, but I have already read to this measure (pointing l4 measures further, literally on the next page!), and there are no D's in this measure, so you confuse me. Wait til' I'm done, then you can correct me." I was in shock. I've never had a student before or since that did this.

Interesting stuff. I've been planning on writing a post with some thoughts regarding advanced sight reading- where the most standard advice cannot possibly match up to what really takes place, for various logical reasons. I'm quite certain that advanced sightreading involves far more processing of exact detail than assumed (I think there's too much emphasis on assumption and deduction, rather than on developing ability to process a lot of information both fast and with complete accuracy). The idea of processing details in peripheral vision makes a lot of sense in this respect.

Dear Tara, I just came across your blog. I never do this, but when you write there's not much research on this topic, well, I actually did my doctoral dissertation on eye movements in music reading (http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/88757, if you're interested). The work is very challenging methodologically, but fascinating. Now we even have a large research project on expert-like music reading and the development of the skill (http://www.utu.fi/readmusic), funded by the Academy of Finland. We're working our way toward understanding what's actually going on during music reading - slowly but surely. :)

Indeed, there is a small but growing body of work on the topic of eye movements in music reading. There is really not much research at all on how to use the information we gain from these studies to try to improve sight-reading. I'd love to discuss your work with you further -- I'll contact you directly.

About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.